CoMorbidity
by auntarctica
Summary: Predictably, Dante can't leave it alone. Set one year prior to DMC 3. VergilxDante, First person Dante POV
1. Chapter 1

My brother's eyes are like glacial lakes, in a Northerly country where I am not welcome.

They are glasslike and distant, as you might see them from the air, flying overhead and looking down—even as he stands before me now, reflecting myself back to me, heartless and silent as an unstrung harp.

A glacier endures.

Nothing flickers; nothing sparks in him at the sight of me. He knows your face, I reason. He wears it every day.

I am immediately angry with myself for wanting to justify his indifference. It is a reflex I've never been able to exorcise. A vestigial limb on a skeleton. Party favors from another life. I could cough up excuses until I turn as blue as his coat, twisting in the wind around him. I don't want to twist in the wind. The anger inside me ratchets up another notch, and I welcome it.

My brother's hair is pale and unreal like mine, but the true length is obscured, pushed back from his immaculate brow in wayward spikes and jags of winter-white, like a Caesar's crown of laurel.

And glaciers are cold, and immovable, and I am not, never was wanted in this latitude.

"Well, if it isn't the bluebird of unhappiness."

"Dante," he says, as if he knows he must, now that he can no longer ignore me. He seems preoccupied, as he always has, as if he has been coolly brooding since the day he left the womb. I am meeting his gaze with unwavering bravado, sliding down the surface of those eyes, unwilling to admit how much he unsettles me, even to myself. It's something I'll think about later, when he's dead.

"...Conspicuous as usual."

I'm pleased that he notices. I pride myself on being conspicuous. And somehow I always go where I'm not wanted.

"Looking good," I tell him, and I mean it. I mean the next thing I say as well. "Sharp coat, bro. It's too bad I'll have shred it to get to you."

He turns his head, and his eyes pass over me in wintry appraisal. "I'll spare yours," he says, with flawless certitude. His attention fixes on my unguarded chest, revealed beneath my open coat, and lingers, pointedly.

"Hey, I made it easy for you, didn't I?" I say, as I rub my hand absently over the slight ridges of my stomach. "Left myself wide open."

"Nothing is ever easy with you, Dante."

He would like to put this off. It gives him no pleasure. He has never cared for me enough to enjoy killing me.

"What is it? Don't like the coat? How can you resist this come-hither red?" I turn a careless circle, feeling the steadying counterweight of Rebellion resting on my shoulder.

"Do I look like an angus bull?"

His voice is withering.

He has yet to draw his precious Yamato, yet to take up any position contrary to mine, and yet, if I attacked him at this moment I have no doubt I'd be hanged by my own offense. He's that good. I begrudge him his breath, his body, his being, but I can't deny his talent.

Talented or not, my brother is taking his sweet time, and it's making me fairly vibrate with impatience. I look around for something to kick. Nothing but grass and statues. I throw up my hands.

With a click and a flip, Ebony is straight-armed at his head.

"Half-dressed and half-cocked," he remarks, idly. "As usual."

My eyes narrow, and travel over him, tracing his lines- the ridged chevrons of satin-black leather that encompass his chest, the gilded patterns of serpentine trim offset against the twilight-blue expanse of his velvet longcoat. His collar is stiff and high, a black silk cravat swathed and tucked beneath it.

" 'Well-clad, and deserving of no more respect than deserved,' " I retort, the words thick and acidic.

" Nicely quoted, Dante," he says, as if there is no intimacy in the act of speaking my name. "It seems you sat still long enough to read a book. I wonder what else has changed since I've been gone?"

His voice is artful, just as I remember it—modulated and sonorous, edged with a slight rasp, and the nightmarish quality of a lullaby. I have never heard him raise it. It is menacing only in its utter equilibrium. My brother can trust himself, for his nature never betrays him. I, who burn out of control, must take care.

A nickname is one thing. It's a derisive cartoon, a shadow appellation. A name is something else entirely. I am not as cavalier as my brother when it comes to presumptuously invoking past endearments. Names are tied to intimacies. Intimacies are bolted to memories. Memories are indelible, and chained to sentiment. Sentiment is soft earth on a treacherous path. Backsliding is inexcusable.

Before I dare to speak it, I swallow his name, and lock it away where it belongs, keeping the company of my blackest thoughts.

"You're one icy fuck, Vergil. I'll give you that."

I'm flip enough as I say it, even laughing a little, but the look that invades his face is disquieting.

He pauses, deliberately. "Is that a noun or a verb?"

Speaking of invoking past intimacies. My brother's tone is coldly curious, curiously cold. My lips twist into a microexpression that I cannot edit fast enough.

"Strange that a man of such few words should be so interested in grammar."

I manage to crack wise, but in truth I am taken aback. I run my hand through my hair and feel the mist settling, cool on my face and chest.

Vergil blinks slowly. "Who says I'm interested?"

My brother is an icy fuck, no doubt about it.

And now, here, in this isolated place, holding those words in the mouth of my mind, I am suddenly, abruptly, almost certainly unsure of myself and my intentions. I have to stop and check my head.

My moment of obscurity is a pure instant, which is all the time Vergil needs to draw his katana.

I evade the singing threat of Yamato by the skin of my teeth, by instinct, relinquishing Ebony to the air. I catch her again as she falls, peripherally catching a telltale flick of Vergil's eyes, and a flick of his wrist as he strikes my hand smartly with the flat of his sword, pressing down with light but unsmiling intent.

"Put that away," he says. "It's barbaric."

The edges of his sword are honed paper-thin, and they lay intimately against my skin, hissing of lavishly spilled blood and surgically precise carnage. They are ultimately bound to the whims of their master, however, and Vergil seems disinclined to relieve me of my hand.

"Fine," I mutter. "We'll do it your way."

He remains still for a moment, then wordlessly lifts his blade. Sighing loudly, I honor my promise and holster the revolver. My brother is regarding me coolly as he sheaths his sword once more. His expression is blatantly unconcerned, almost thoughtful.

"I don't hate you, Dante," he says, after a moment.

Of course he doesn't. Hate is a twisted outgrowth of love, a different branch on the same warped tree.

"Yeah? Well I don't like you."

I am lying. I hate him, and I want to see him dead.

I reach behind my shoulder and grasp the cold hilt of Rebellion, drawing it forward in a fluid arc of slow mercury.

"You are ungrateful, of course," Vergil remarks. "You always have been."

"Shut up," I tell him, viciously decapitating an unfortunate angel statue. We watch as the head hits the loamy ground with a muffled thump.

Vergil narrows his eyes. "Quit acting out. It's unbecoming."

Rebellion is solid in my hands now, and I am readying my stance. "I wouldn't get too comfortable, big brother."

Vergil has the slightly peeved look of a Persian tomcat. "Be reasonable, Dante," he warns me. "Or it will be just like old times."

"I'm feeling nostalgic."

"I'll send you weeping home to mother," Vergil says ominously, and it honestly throws me for a second, considering that our mother is...

Oh.

Oh, _wow_. Just wow.

I level my gaze at him.

My brother looks terminally underwhelmed. His katana remains where it rests, the gilded hilt just visible, like a cobra slyly protruding from the sweep of his coat. I lunge, abruptly, so as not to betray my intent, but you cannot underestimate Vergil. I intend to blitz him when he's arrogantly careless, but somehow his sword is out before I can even land a strike. It clashes against mine, and slides down the length to lock at the hilt, where we are at a brief impasse, before he pushes off and away.

So it's on. It's on, because I brought it on.

"My serve," he murmurs.

Yamato slices in a graceful arc, descending, whispering deadly promises in a language I can't speak, but have always understood. I sidestep, and air-trick, and face him once more. It is straining my considerable ability to stay out of his range. I am not his equal, but I am holding my own by a thread, as I always have.

He moves with uniquely seamless grace. I remember being younger, and mesmerized by his movements, so liquid and organic that I could scarcely believe there was any force behind them. I know better now.

We are biological clockwork, striking and evading, an infinite mechanized precision, as if we were intended to interact and react in exactly this way. Rhythmic interaction. Pulse and ebb, plunge and withdraw. My mind begins to wander at the thought, straying into pastures that I never intended to revisit, recalling things I never-

"Ha," exclaims Vergil, sharp-soft, in subdued triumph.

I realize I've fucked up, truly and well, a split second before it is illustrated to me in the media of pain. It's the kind of mistake my brother adores, the kind that makes his eyes go all light and narrow, and he's obviously pleased, even though his mouth is taut and set, because I know how he looks when he's pleased. That's exactly why I lost my focus in the first place.

I am outmatched.

I hate him with every fiber of my essence.

A blow to my stomach sends me falling back, and I attempt to recover, as my brother sheathes his sword. A kick follows, ensuring that my path follows through to its ultimate conclusion, as my back abuts the cold, worn wall of a freestanding ruin. Vergil's weight joins me a moment later, slamming me back, reinforcing my fall.

I am too furious to respond, too conflicted at the sudden proximity. It isn't what I wanted, this body caging mine, those lean hands pinning my wrists into the ancient grit of the monument with polished brutality. It isn't what I came for. My brother looks down at my lips, and I feel myself slipping into the smooth-worn groove of a pattern so indelible it might as well be tattooed into my existence. Clearly my body has an entirely different opinion of Vergil than I do.

He removes himself before I can push him away, releasing me with perfunctory physical indifference.

"You telegraph," he tells me, breathing softly. "All of your intentions. Always have."

"You don't say." My voice is willful, forcedly even.

"I do."

"Guess I'll have to work on that," I reply, insolently leaning against the headless angel.

"If it bothers you," Vergil says, coolly. "It never has before."

"Yeah, but you always have," I retort. "And I'm willing to bet that won't change."

"Always was once a collection of befores," Vergil says, cryptically.

My eyes narrow. "What the fuck does that mean?" I demand, incredulous.

Vergil turns. His fingers slowly graze upward over the hilt of his katana, and he lets the gold laces slip through them, the gesture almost sensual, definitely reverent.

"You're far better, Dante," he concedes, neutrally. "But nowhere near good enough."

I stand there, seething with indignation, and outrage, and most of all, I can't believe I'm jealous of a _sword_.

Meanwhile, my brother is walking away with his hasteless stride. I can never understand why I always have to run to catch up with him.


	2. Chapter 2

I am rapt, for a moment, staring after his retreating back. He is walking away from me, the Prussian-blue ends of his coat flowing out behind him in an artful splay.

"Not so fast, bro," I declare with a dramatic point of my finger.

Vergil pauses, but does not turn. His shoulders are structured and set.

"What do you want from me, Dante?" he asks, quietly.

"Nothing," I tell him, vehement.

"This is _my _sanctuary," Vergil intones. "You came to me."

"I came to kick your lungs out your ass."

"Such things you say," he says, dryly.

"Trust me, Vergil. You have nothing that I want."

He snorts, softly. There is a hint of contempt in the sound.

"Why don't I believe you?"

I feel unreasonable fury gathering in the bunched muscles of my shoulders, as I draw Rebellion and lunge at him with everything I'm worth. He doesn't turn around, but I hear the raw clank of blunt Western steel against a fine Eastern edge, and realize that he has shot Yamato out to the side and blocked my strike. Vergil whirls like a dervish and I find my attack checked, thwarted and redirected, the razor-thin edge of the katana now pressing against my throat.

"Hey, now that's more like it," I whisper, breathless.

He is dispassionate, regarding me at the end of his sword like a forgotten curiosity. His eyes are arctic, his manner detached. He no longer has any love for this game.

"This is becoming tiresome, Dante. I don't have time to play anymore. I suggest you find yourself a new diversion."

I hate being dismissed. Particularly by that bastard.

"You know what I came for, bro, and I'm not leaving until you give it to me."

I am stubborn, or as Vergil would say, _obstinate_; always have been, probably always will be. I can hear the mulishness in my tone, but Vergil knows me and has no reason to doubt my sincerity. Vergil looks as if he is at war with himself. Having been there, I don't envy him.

"All right, Dante," he says, finally, in his worn-velvet voice. After a moment he checks Yamato, re-sheathing her with a soft whisper of steel stirring leather. "I'll give you what you came for."

"Well, thanks for squeezing me in, bro." I am smirking, half sardonic, half triumphant. "Because I can imagine how busy you must be, here in the middle of fucking nowhere."

His eyes narrow.

"But not here."

"Why not here?" I look around. Apple-green grass and moss-laden pagodas, wide-open expanses. This is where he trains, after all. "Looks good to me."

"This is my sanctuary."

"Sanctuary," I scoff. "You mean your happy place? Is this your happy place, Vergil? What, am I tainting your happy place?"

"This is where I contemplate the future," he says coolly. The implication is unspoken. He doesn't have to say it. But he does anyway. "Not the past."

It's not like him; he usually goes for subtlety. My fingers tighten around Rebellion. "Maybe you don't have a future," I bristle.

He meets my gaze, and narrows his own. He pivots slowly on his heel and crosses the arena, heading toward the wall of sheer rock that rises up behind the clearing with leisurely strides, posture impeccable and upright. Rolling my eyes, I curse, and follow him.

Vergil pauses to wait for me, but keeps his eyes ahead. His stance is familiar, unchanged since the last time I saw him. His hand is at his hip, resting habitually on the finely-wrapped hilt of his sword. His gloves are fingerless, allowing him to feel her every shift in combat. Mine are too, but let's be honest—with me it's more of a fashion statement.

I come up beside him, and follow his gaze. "There," he says, coolly.

It's a narrow rift in the igneous rock, vertical and situated on a bias, so as to be almost invisible to the naked eye at a casual glance. Without another word Vergil steps forward, angling his body with innate grace, and slips inside.

This is all looking a little underworld to me, a little suspect. I'm beginning to wonder if he's setting me up. Maybe this has all been an elaborate ruse in order to ambush me with my guard down. My hopes rise.

"Right behind you, bro," I murmur.

I confront the jagged rent, finding it navigable. It's more generous than I had thought from an oblique perspective, and I shrug and sidle through it, resisting the temptation to widen it with a little quick and dirty renovation, Sparda-style. It's not a long passage, only a couple of meters. Not long enough to become claustrophobic, but as far as I can tell it leads straight back into the cliff, which I'll admit is pretty fucking special.

At the end it opens up into a small cavern. I step out of the rock and onto a large Persian rug, incongruously laid on the stone floor. Vergil is standing inside, waiting for me, arms crossed negligently over his chest.

"Welcome to my domicile, Dante." He shoots me a withering glance. "Behave as best you can."

Torches blaze along the rough walls, illuminating a giant portrait of our father. I recognize it as the one that used to hang in the grand ballroom of our happy home. If I feel a slight twinge in my ribcage I don't betray it. Practice makes perfect, as Vergil would espouse, and I've gotten good at perpetual insouciance.

I look around deliberately, then I laugh, shaking my head.

"I gotta hand it to you, bro. Most people leave home and get a crappy first apartment, you know, with a stained shag carpet and some douche of a roommate. Oh, but not you, Vergil, you nonconformist. You step out of a mansion and into a cave. Classy move, bro. Mom would be proud."

"Some _douche_ of a roommate," echoes Vergil, and even I can hear the irony in his tone. "I had a roommate in utero, Dante. It's overrated."

There is a corridor leading off to the left. Vergil turns and pauses at the mouth of it, looking back over his shoulder. "…But this is only the antechamber. Allow me to show you the rest."

Despite his thoroughly modern aesthetic, my brother is weirdly old-fashioned, like my dad was, the kind of guy who can use the word _antechamber_ in a sentence without batting an eye, oblivious to your reaction.

I jog after him, catching up and falling into step beside him. He glances at me, but says nothing. We proceed down the hall at a leisurely pace, and I am struck, suddenly, by how strange it feels to be side by side once more, walking in tandem, instead of facing each other at an impasse. We are both silent. Maybe it's reverence for such a singular event, or maybe it's plain old surprise at finding ourselves in physical agreement this way, unwittingly. Somehow it's less awkward than it should be, considering the turn my feelings for him have taken since Mom died, and considering his utter lack of feeling for me.

My relationship with my brother is far from normal. I accept that. We're not oil and water; we're baking soda and vinegar. Yet even given everything that's bitter and brackish between us, sometimes that polarity is reversed, and we are drawn together. It's rare, but it does happen.

And when it does, it is a compulsion. A magnetic pull like the earth has never seen, impossible to deny. Impossible to divide. It comes to mind insidiously, like a spontaneous erection, as memory inserts a sly tongue in my unwilling ear. She reminds me that there are things I am omitting from the record. That there are other ways Vergil and I have come to physical agreement in the past, but there is no way in hell I am going to think about that.

Because that's ancient history. That is the past, and this is Vergil Sparda's fucking all-important sanctuary, where he contemplates the future. Such as it is. It won't be much of one, if I have anything to say about it.

The tunnel leads us into a vast grotto, almost like a natural cathedral within the rock, and I stop cold, taking it all in. I am actually rendered speechless for a moment. Vaguely, I wonder what I was expecting. Nothing like this, that's for sure.

"Here it is," Vergil announces, and his voice is unceremoniously dry. "Be it ever so humble." He strolls past me without further remark, the soft, unhurried strikes of his stride sounding lightly on the stone floor of the cave.

Rustic it may well be, but there is little to call humble.

I am looking around, debating the respective merits of various quips and insults, but Vergil's villa-in-the-rock is pretty trick, and what's more, it's absolutely him; I'm suddenly distracted by a million things that all bespeak my brother in different ways, from the insidious to the ordinary to the charming.

To my left, bookshelves line the high rock wall from ceiling to floor, crammed full of hardbound volumes in an impossible array of sizes and colors. Where he came by so many books, I have no idea. Had he acquired them all in the year since he moved out?

There are wing-backed leather club chairs, the real deal—brass tacks and all—arranged in a studiously haphazard way. They are a deep, rich, burnished red, warm and weathered, inviting in a way that Vergil is not. I could see kicking back in one of those babies and taking a nice long nap, with my boots propped up on that fancy desk. But Vergil's hospitality only extends so far, and I'm already testing his patience merely by existing, not to mention having the temerity to do my current existing here and now, in his unorthodox abode.

Temerity. There's a word I'd never know if not for Vergil.

I drift closer to the desk, running my hand over a floor globe as I pass, giving it a shove and setting the earth into a wild spin. Taken at a glance, my brother's place is quaint, civilized. Maybe a little eccentric, but charming nonetheless. The domain of a scholar, an academic, a mild-mannered intellectual.

I know better.

What gives him away, like most people, is the little things. On the desk are a couple of ancient relics that have nothing to do with human history. He is using them as paperweights. It also appears my brother was doing a little light reading earlier; his singular destructive habit of dog-earing his books is in evidence here. The text on the spine of the book is in a language no anthropology professor will ever encounter.

The devil's in the details, as they say.

Vergil is pacing lithely and slightly, just in the range of my peripheral vision, like a tiger in a cage. His arms are crossed and he seems conflicted. His brow is lower, his eyes are narrower. His lips are moued slightly outward as if contemplating a problem, which I assume, you know, is me.

After a moment of watching me manhandle his things, he reaches his saturation point and breaks his pattern, turning to address me in a voice that seethes impatience through the low modulated tone of civility.

"We're getting nowhere, Dante. Let's get on with this little social call. Let's not waste any more time circling the subject."

I smile. Now that I have his full attention, suddenly, I'm in no hurry. I saunter through the incongruous elegance of his hideaway with a leisurely swagger, the counterweight of Rebellion reassuring on my shoulder.

"Can't believe you'd rather get it on in here than outside," I say, looking around.

Vergil looks as if he is restraining himself from replying.

"…I mean, _hey_, look at this vase." I poke it with my sword. It wobbles unsteadily on its ancient base. "Looks _f__ragile_."

A sinister observation.

"It's Ming."

"It's toast."

He gives me a wintry glance.

"Go ahead," he says, calmly, as I raise Rebellion over my head—

"—It was mother's."

I falter, halted in my tracks.

"What?"

"You don't remember it?" he asks, arch, as he comes around the pedestal to face me, arms crossed.

I shake my head, staring hard at the elaborate lacquer, trying to spark a memory, some recognition.

"It was in the library," Vergil says dryly. "It's possible you never actually saw it."

He's funny.

I brush off most of his drawled asides without a thought. It's second nature. Our nature. Not so this time. It shouldn't mean anything, but it hits me in a subterranean place, a place I thought had calcified long ago.

He's wrong, because he's implying I never set foot in our vast library at home. In fact, growing up, I went there more often than I liked to remember. However he's inadvertently right, in that I probably never even registered the vase when I did, because when I went there I was always looking for something else that could often be found in the library.

My eyes narrow and I turn away to hide my reaction, forcing my voice into its straightjacket of careless bravado. "You're funny, bro. I always forget that about you."

I can feel Vergil's narrowed eyes at my back, feel him silently assessing me. After a long moment he speaks. "Perhaps forgetting everything is in your best interest, Dante. Begin with Father and end with me."

I snort, flinging my arms hard across my chest, facing away from him so that he can't see how my face contorts. I am furious at my frustration, at this unwanted pain. I am furious, because Vergil abandoned me, and I care. And I don't want to fucking care. And I don't want to chase his fucking shadow any more.

But I can't seem to let him go.

So there we are, polarized princes of a dead lineage. Forever frozen, yet liquid with antipathy.

"It should have been you," I tell him, venomous.

"Beg pardon?" Vergil demands coolly.

"It should have been you, not Mom. When the demons stormed our house, and ripped her to pieces—"

"Go on," he mutters, quietly.

"I wish you were dead," I said, turning around. "I really fucking do."

Vergil is silent for a moment. Then he turns away.

"You may yet get your wish, Dante. But not today."


	3. Chapter 3

"We'll see about that," I say. I can feel the slatting of my own eyes. I holster Rebellion with a forceful shove and reach for Ebony and Ivory, satisfaction coursing through me as I curl my fingers around their textured grips.

I don't care if it's barbaric in Vergil's estimation. He won't live long enough to care.

I expect him to roll his eyes, to twist his lips, to tell me to give it a rest, that he isn't amused, but Vergil isn't responding to my extremely obvious overture toward violence. Instead, he is staring straight ahead, with something like conviction in his gaze. When he speaks it is abrupt, but with measured intensity.

"Do you remember the night I left, Dante?"

My fingers weaken on my guns. A hollowness rises into my throat. My pulse kicks up a racket and begins thudding. I feign insolent negligence for all I'm worth.

"Maybe I do."

"Maybe," repeats Vergil, dryly matching my tone. "Forgive me if I failed to be memorable. It wasn't for lack of trying."

No, it definitely wasn't.

I release my weapons, almost without thinking. My mind is in turmoil, and all over a few choice words from my brother's taut, dispassionate lips.

"You just told me to forget everything," I manage, with a false smirk that actually hurts my mouth to acquit. "Make up your mind, bro."

Vergil studies me like I'm under glass. "I've never been the indecisive one, Dante." His sueded voice caresses my name in a way I can't explain. It frays my will like a sharkskin rasp, and he invokes it all too often.

"You think a trip down our twisted little memory lane is going to derail me, is that it?" I muster all my breath and blow on the embers of my anger, attempting to refresh the bonfire of hatred I so lovingly tend for him. "Is that what you think?"

My brother's expression is petulant. "I think you should see what's behind the red door."

I follow his gaze to the back of the cavern, and there it is: a freestanding door without walls, utterly in contradiction of earthly physics, and I know it must be a demonic port, but how would Vergil have concocted such a thing? Had he been learning our father's trade in earnest all this time?

No, I think. There's no fucking way. I hate to admit it, but I am intrigued. It seems like Vergil knew I would be. I start toward it at once, and he follows me, slightly lagging, his steps hasteless and graceful behind mine. I slap my palm against it, about to shove it wide open, but in the next moment I pause.

"Wait," I say, turning around. "If I go through that door, what am I going to find, bro?"

"What does it matter?" he says mildly. "You'll go in regardless."

I could make this easy, but why would I do that?

"Vergil, Vergil—you're no fun anymore. Come on, bro. You can tell me. Is it a frost demon? A fury? A harpy? A tanning booth? A whole cabinet of Precious Moments figurines?"

He doesn't reply, just stands there, indifferent, regarding me like I'm pickled in a jar.

"I know you have some fun planned, Vergil. Spill it. Mormons? Dobermans? Angry geese? Which one?" I lean toward him and drop my voice to a confidential whisper. "It's a tanning booth, isn't it."

"Far worse."

"Really?" I'm actually impressed.

"You'll shudder."

"Pffffffffft. No I won't. What is it?"

"A bed," he says, coolly.

I blink.

He nods and gives me a semi-contemptuous twist of his lips as he usurps me at the door and turns to go inside.

"I don't get it," I confess, shadowing him, the way I did when we were kids. "Like a bed of nails? Or are you maybe just getting a little ambitious with the metaphors—like 'mwahaha, your eternal rest' or some shit like that?"

Vergil's glance is sharp and sidewise. "If I were being metaphorical, we'd be here until October. You're not gifted in that area."

"I compensate," I inform him, "by not being an ostentatious prick."

He ignores me, and he is gifted, if not outright blessed, in that area.

"In any event," he drawls in a surly purr, "if I were being metaphorical, the obvious allusion to make would have been _death bed_; the semantic semaphore of which would have been completely squandered, as you so effectively illustrated, because—and I reiterate—nuance is not your forte."

I stare.

He tilts his head, holding me in that passionless gaze. "…I'm not given to otiose endeavors, Brother."

"Did you say _odious_?" I sneer. "Because wow, I'd like to open up the floor on that one."

"I'd like the floor to open up, too." Vergil glowers mordantly down at the flagstones. "You have no idea."

The earth does not yawn open for my brother, much to his chagrin. So there is only the door. Vergil extends his silk-jacketed arm and throws it open, with probably a little more flourish than is strictly necessary to get the job done. He gives me a disdainful glance. It lands on me like a lead-footed sparrow.

"After you."

My smirk is more reflex than response. "Get used to it," I retort.

Vergil shakes his head. His lips are set as a statue's; his sigh is epic, like the retreat of a massive tide. My brother suffers. I admit that. Whatever. I suffered first.

I step through the nonexistent threshold, and stop. Cold. Incredulity floods me, then outrage. "What the hell is this, Vergil?" I demand tightly, urgency straining my words.

"What do you think it is?" he drawls, almost indolent, as he strolls up beside me, arms crossed negligently across his chest.

I turn toward him, alarmed. It's not the reaction I want to have, but I can't help it. I am not cool with this, not even a little, not at all.

"You can't do this, Vergil."

Vergil gazes at me obliquely, idle curiosity playing over his sharp and striking features, blunting the cut of them just enough to mitigate the unbridled winter of his person.

"And what exactly would _this_ be, pray tell?"

"A fucking portal to the Demon World, if I don't fucking miss my guess," I sputter, disbelieving. Disapproving. "Am I right, you motherfucker?"

My brother laughs very slightly. My whole body remembers his laugh; the rarified brush of feathers and rust. My whole body responds.

"It's not the Demon World, Dante. It's only a pocket dimension. A space between." He looks pretty impressed with himself, in his understated way. "Just practice," he murmurs. "A shadow world. A virgin page awaiting my touch."

I stare, my brows drawn inward, my mouth open."What the hell does that mean?"

My brother meets my eyes, levelly. "It means, Dante, that I created everything you see."

"You're full of shit."

"The one who says it can't be done should not interrupt the one doing it, Dante." The chill is back in his tone. He suddenly seems almost angry, as if he's being denied the credit he deserves and so richly expected.

I put the heels of my hands to my temples and press, unable to reconcile the vista before me with anything but the strange oil paintings our dad had in his office. Landscapes with a difference; the kind of thing you aren't going to see in the Louvre unless the exhibit is Hieronymous Bosch.

If this place was indeed born out of my brother's whitethorn-crowned head, it's clear what his influences were. Overhead the arched and encompassing sky swirls with Technicolor oxides, searing in an orgy of rose and purple and gold, streaked with dark grey clouds in wisps and claws.

We are standing on a precipice, high above a burning world.

"It's just a sketch," he intones.


	4. Chapter 4

"Maybe I'm fucking crazy, but I thought you said something about a bed," I mutter.

I am pretty sure it's a bed of nails at this point, because I am obviously staring at purgatory.

"It's just across the lake of fire," says Vergil, with arctic calm.

"Nice." It' a flat statement. Maybe it's a lake bed, and he's going to pour me in concrete.

He smiles, another brief flash of winter. "Did you expect anything less?"

I shake my head, and I am looking hard at him, at his impenetrable façade; his impervious manner. My eyes are hard, because they have to be. These days he gives me no choices.

"I really don't know what to expect anymore," I say. The words are grinding and I can taste their bitterness. "You're not the brother I knew and..." I break off abruptly as I realize how the phrase ends that I intend. "Lived with." I manage to salvage my words without too much of a hitch.

But he is, and that is the bitterest thing of all. Vergil is still Vergil, and I am still myself. All that has changed is everything.

My brother is staring impassively into the horizon, his sculpted brow smooth and low over his piercing eyes. "Rather make love to the past than the present, is that it, Dante?"

I shoot him a look of pure hatred. "What fucking choice do I have?"

Vergil's lips thin into a hard line, for the slightest of moments, but I catch it, from the corner of my eye. The next instant he is back to glass; all smooth surfaces and cool amusement.

"Why don't you tell me what you want, Dante. I want to hear you say it."

I say nothing. I don't have to tell him. He can read me, he can read my eyes. He can read me through our common genes, our shared blood, our collective demonic affliction.

Vergil's smile is crisp and minute.

"You want to go home," he murmurs, and the words are oh-so-delicate and mercurial in the sulfurous drag of the atmosphere.

He knows me. Better than anyone else ever has, or ever will. I hate him, more than anyone else can, or ever will.

His eyes narrow. "…Shall I take you back?"

My eyes narrow in response, unwittingly mirroring his.

"Take me back where? Haven't you dragged me far enough? You want to throw down in your little sandbox, fine. I don't care. I'll fight you here, or anywhere else."

Vergil sighs, brows vaulting involuntarily as he closes his eyes.

"So you've said," he bites out, exasperated. In the next moment he has seized my forearm in his gloved hand.

I have time to rip out an indignant "Hey," and then the flames and sulfur-dyed sky and the stark cliffs are gone, replaced by cool and ominous night. I pull free of his grasp with a jerk, staggering away as I grab his embroidered lapels and push him from me with reactionary violence.

"What the fuck did you do?" I demand, reflexively reaching for my guns. I can feel the residual wildness of my eyes, and the lingering disorientation; the sense of having the world seem to dissolve and fall away around you while you're standing still.

Vergil is smoothing his coat, ruffled at my assault, looking churlish.

"I teleported, you barbarian."

I shoot him an incredulous look, but my attention is stolen with the force of a kick to the solar plexus when I realize where we are. A strangled sound forces its way past my throat.

It is our grand ballroom, or it was, once, before the heartless incursion of the elements.

Now the ornate paneled walls are almost bare, peeling back to the ancient plaster, paint and paper faded and curling in on themselves. Opulent fixtures hang at twisted angles or dangle from wires; gilt mirrors are reduced to weathered frames, glass lying below in malicious, glittering piles. Moonlight streams through the great, shattered windows and casts stark elongated figures on the scarred and ruined floor.

And the windows.

The great, many-paned windows that the demons crashed through in a rain of glass and a frenzy of scythes and claws and inhuman shrieking when they came for us, slaughtering our human mother without even the gratuitous pretense of a struggle, as if she were nothing but a china doll, a toy left in the way, broken and discarded in the pursuit of other things.

It hadn't even slowed them down.

Since then our house has been alone, weak and wasting, raped and ravaged. Scorched by the sun and bleached by the moon, silent and accusing through many long nights of dry and thirsty blackness. Lying crippled in this field, open to the merciless seasons.

I stare, overcome, haunted by the heavy atmosphere of despair and decay.

Vergil is watching me, his gaze inscrutable.

The breeze intrudes without apology, swirling dead leaves along the warped parquet floor, over paint and paper litter. Outside the grass is monstrous and overgrown, dry and rattling against the remnants of glass that jaggedly line the lower halves of the windows.

"I brought it here," he says. "Every detail. This is how our house now stands, Dante."

I swallow; something sharp seems to be stuck in my throat. I am mute, oppressed by visceral emotion, confronted by this outgrowth of the past.

Vergil stops to run his hand along the fireplace mantel. He does not seem surprised at my reticence. He looks at his fingers idly. "Could use a little TLC."

The chill of his nonchalance is just another force of nature to afflict this once-loved structure. I struggle into the present moment, forcing my tongue toward words. I am traumatized, but beyond that I am incensed—at his irreverence, at his callous infliction of this sight on my unsuspecting eyes.

"You brought it here?" I manage to grind out. "Here, to your little closet world?"

I move toward him, glass delicately breaking under my unforgiving boots.

Vergil's glance is sidewise, unconcerned. "More or less. Out in the mortal world, our Father's great house is abandoned and moldering, just as it is here, in my modest homage. This is a complete mirror of that, in each and every detail. They breathe and age and die together. What happens there is reflected here."

My eyes narrow, feral. "Then this isn't really our house. This is a fucking lie."

This revelation should make it better, somehow, but it doesn't.

Vergil eyes me, his body unresponsive to my approach. "It's not a lie," he says, temperately. "It's merely an identical twin. Are you a lie because I existed first?"

I flinch, involuntarily, turning away with a heavy red swing of my leather coat. There's no way I'm telling him how often I've asked myself the same rhetorical question.

My brother follows at a distance, frowning. "…What's the matter, Dante? Lose your motivation? Where's all the blast and bravado?"

The hollow house surrounds us, and it chills me to the bone. This is where Mom died, and my brother and I lost our anchor to all normalcy. Here the silent accusation hangs over my head; that I couldn't save her.

It was like nothing I'd ever seen before, a horrible bolt from the blue.

I remember everything in flashes: the blitz attack, the rain of shattering glass, Mom's warning cries. I remember how alarmed I was, realizing her screams would draw them straight to her, and so I redoubled my efforts, battering demons left and right with every inch of my ability, but it wasn't enough. They kept coming, inexhaustible, spawned from a vaporous black circle in the middle of the ballroom floor.

I was being overcome, scarcely keeping my head above the screeching influx. I was inches from being eviscerated, Rebellion knocked out of my hand. Suddenly I heard a sharp, guttural _'ha'_, and the sound of a singing blade. And there was my brother Vergil, walking calmly to my rescue.

I fought as hard as I knew how to, then, but Vergil was privy to things I had yet to learn about our capabilities, and the nature of our enemy. Vergil knew what they were, what we were, what we stood to become.

Now he stands before me, softly contemptuous, quietly condescending. "Here's your past, Dante. The ashes you idealize. Is this what you desire?"

He has a point to prove, my brother, and that's why we're here, that's why he's forcing me to relive this hastily buried anguish, to bleed these old wounds again.

But that's not all that he's awakened with this little detour. Old resentments claw to the surface, demanding satisfaction. I have another agenda, now, and my whole body shudders with the onus of it, the burden of shouldering its implications. I want answers, and I want them from Vergil.


	5. Chapter 5

I turn to look at him all at once, knowing that I seethe resentment. I make no effort to conceal the depths of my loathing.

"Why," I demand, bitterly. "Tell me why didn't you help Mom."

His eyes narrow and he gives me a faintly incredulous look, but doesn't reply.

My next words are almost as hard on my pride as losing her was on my heart, but it has to be said, no matter how much salt it strews in my ego wounds. I glare, bracing myself as I utter them, low and on the point of my tongue.

"And yeah, you know what? Maybe I was out of my league that night. Maybe I couldn't do it, but you could have. You could have saved her from that, that—"

_Vivisection._

Vergil stares at me. "You're not serious," he mutters.

"Dead serious," I spit, squaring my shoulders in a battle-ready stance.

His lip curls into an affronted sneer. "Are you really going to look this particular gift horse in the mouth, Dante?"

"I will when it's a Trojan horse."

His eyes flicker, briefly, and I can tell he's momentarily impressed by my unexpected acumen, and that shouldn't give me this sudden infusion of pride and unexpected pleasure, but it does. I hate myself for it, and I turn that hatred outward, glowering.

"Only one of you could be saved, in the spare moments I had." Vergil looks as if this is a foregone conclusion that should be self-evident, and he seems almost contemptuous at my audacity in questioning it.

"So it was a choice," I say, and my voice is rough with emotion. "A choice that you made. A calculated logical decision."

"It wasn't much of a choice," Vergil replies, without particular inflection. "To say it was a choice implies that there was some conflict about the outcome. There wasn't."

I stare, struck wordless by his unvarnished disclosure, his utter lack of regret. "How can you say that?" I breathe, furious. "She was our _mother_."

My brother's brow draws low and his lips twist briefly with distaste.

"I won't pretend I agonized over it, Dante, just to assuage your guilt over living. Would it be better that I let our mother die if I took all day to reach the same conclusion? Would it make her any less dead? I saved you. I wrote her off without a second thought. Believe me, Eva would have wanted it that way, had she survived long enough to weigh in on the matter."

"How the hell do you know what she wanted?" I demand, turning on him, lunging closer, my chest bare and my heart hammering.

"Trust me," Vergil counters coolly, with a touch of reluctance. "I know."

"She told you this?"

"More or less," he mutters, resting his hand on Yamato's hilt as if to remind himself it is at his disposal should this conversation become too awkward. "We had words once," he adds, with a slight grimace. "Eva made herself and her priorities quite clear to me. And I made her a promise."

I stare at him. He looks as if the words taste like cyanide and ass, but he dutifully spits them out, like he's compelled under a spell that I can't see.

"What did she say?"

"That's not important," Vergil drawls, ragged, on the edges of his voice.

"The fuck it's not!"

"Eva and I had an understanding. That's all you ever need to know."

He is being evasive, and I know—I _know_—I should press him on what matters, but my emotions get the best of me.

"She was your fucking mother!" It's a rising yell that culminates in a punch to the crumbling wall, which breaks around my knuckles like meringue. "But you never call her Mom. Why don't you ever call her Mom, you goddamn fuck?"

Vergil seems almost diffident for a moment, eyes averting to somewhere beyond me. "I don't know," he murmurs, finally, in a halting cadence, as if he has often wondered this himself.

I shake my head.

My brother stands utterly still, like a statue, watching me. He holds himself like a young Caesar, with the eyes of an ancient god. The wind rustles through, lifting the split ends of his coat, exposing the contrasting sunset colored silk of the lining, like the dangerous underbelly of a newt.

"I'd ask what you'd have done in my place, Dante…"

A fallen chandelier lies in the middle of the floor, crystals sprayed and shattered outward from its epicenter like some deliberate deconstructionist expression. I remember fighting underneath it, season after season, across from my brother.

"…But you've already made it perfectly clear."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Words, Dante." His voice is soft and raw. "Words are like sparrows. Once you let them go, they can't be caught again."

He turns the tables on me like sleight of hand, and I find myself taken aback.

As much as I covet his perfection, his effortless savoir-faire, I had never even considered putting myself in his place. It was Vergil, always Vergil, who made all the calls, who took all the risks and subsequent hits, who took it upon himself to be the best, the undefeated, the indefatigable. Vergil who had the driving ambition. Vergil who never needed saving.

Vergil who never needed me.

I fall silent for a long moment, my arms finding their way over my chest and threading across. I scowl at the wooden floor, scarred and ornate. There's nothing to kick, nothing to punch, nothing to shoot. Nothing to smash with Rebellion. Everything is already destroyed.

"No," I say, through resisting lips.

"No?"

A mere shift in context has a nasty way of unveiling latent hypocrisy, as I'm sure my brother knows. "No," I tell him, again, more vehemently, throwing my hands up in frustration. "All right?"

Vergil is watching me, his eyes narrowed and pale in the moonlight. "Care to elaborate?"

I don't care to elaborate, or want to, either. I really fucking don't. I run my hand back through my hair, conflicted, playing for time.

"It would have been you," I finally say, averting my eyes. "I would have saved you." It costs me. It's not lip service, and I can't look at Vergil when I say it.

It kills me most to know that it's true, to admit I would choose my cold-hearted brother over anyone else when faced with an ultimatum. Even my own mother. I feel a sickening sense of betrayal, as if Mom can hear me somehow, now that it's been confessed aloud into the universal ether, and not merely an unvoiced echo enclosed within the four walls of my mind.

I thrust my head into my hands, briefly, trying to gather myself once more into some semblance of vengeance. I try to remember what I came for.

Around us our childhood home is aching, abandoned, weathered. My chest is also aching, empty and open to the elements. My heart is exposed on the cliffs of my ribcage, raw and beating.

I stumble—toward the door, I think—it's a door to nowhere, to Vergil's world of fire, but at least I'm moving in some direction. It doesn't really matter. I can't stand the air in this place; it's stagnant, cloying, and I'm choking on old sorrow.

Vergil seizes my arm in his gloved hand and pulls me around to face him.

"What's wrong with you?" he demands, _sotto voce_, a rare note of incredulity in his voice. His eyes are narrowed and hyperaware, as if we're in public and he's afraid of provoking an even bigger spectacle.

I grab him by the lapels and hurl him against the wall, disintegrating lime and plaster, knocking off chips of paint that cascade down around him like nightmare confetti.

"You," I rip out, breathlessly. "You're what's wrong with me. It's always been you."


	6. Chapter 6

We are frozen for a moment.

His pale eyes stare into mine. There are chips of paint and plaster on his shoulders, his hair. He dusts himself off with a few flicks of his hand, as minimal and effective as his swordsmanship, and then he is immaculate once more, my brother.

"Then end this façade, Dante," he says, in a voice that's low and tempered within an inch of its life; measured out in teaspoons in the quiet of the room. "Tell me what you came for. All you need do is part your lips, and admit…"

"I can't take this." I'm shuddering. It's involuntary, like I'm in the grip of some unnamed affliction. "I can't bear this place."

Vergil stares, rapt, then he moves toward me.

I draw Ebony and Ivory, throwing them out before me and training them at the chevrons on his leather-clad chest. It does not check him. If I'm honest, I didn't expect it to.

Without breaking stride, he pulls out Yamato and knocks my hands aside with the flat of the blade, then presses in, mercilessly invading my personal space, reversing our positions so that it's my back against the wall now, me that's pressed up against the ancient plaster and weathered paneling of our dead home.

"That's not what you came for."

His voice is soft, tarnished silver, at odds with the cool and brutal economy of his actions.

My pulse is thrumming beneath my skin. My lips part in silent protest, but my body flexes against his at once, immediate and involuntary. I close my eyes, resisting his arctic gaze, unable to bear its indecent accusation.

Vergil grasps the red leather of my coat and leans into me with tender violence. I feel his breath on my neck as he turns his face toward my ear.

"Frankly I'm at a loss to comprehend your mercurial turn against me, brother." He finesses the words, and I envy them the lingering adulation of his mouth. "We were so close."

I can't separate lust from anger from anguish anymore, as he shoves the lapels of my red coat apart and jerks it down my arms, forcing my to drop my guns.

Forcing me. Fuck, no, I drop them gladly.

I lower my head, closing my eyes, trying to block everything out, as if Vergil and I are not standing in some sick similacrum of a ribcage where a heart once was, where a hearth once lay. "How could you do this? Why did you bring this monstrosity here? Isn't it enough to know it's out there, decaying in the mortal world, and we can never go home?"

I find myself sinking, knees bending, back slipping down the weathered wall. There's a prickling heat behind my eyes, strange and foreboding and rare. Vergil notices. I see the alarm in his gaze.

"Dante." There's something almost like panic in his voice, but not quite. Never quite. I feel Vergil's hand on my face, taking hold of my jaw, forcing me to look into his eyes. "Don't you see, Dante? The difference is that here I can do anything I desire." His voice drops to an urgent, rasping lullaby. "I can resurrect it for you."

He pulls Yamato from her sheath and draws his arm back in a single, smooth stroke, never leaving my proximity. For a moment I think he's going to run me through, but instead he plunges her straight into the plaster at my side. He shudders at the thrust, as if channeling some power, either from her or to her. I can't tell which.

The wall behind me seems to come alive. I can feel it vibrating, like a holy relic. I watch, taken aback, as the ballroom begins to slowly reassemble itself, fragment by fragment, piece by piece, like the sand in an hourglass running backward, like snow falling upward, colors rebrightening, fabric unrotting, tatters regrowing. The massive chandelier turns slowly on the parquet floor as its shattered crystals reform and draw to it once more, like a litter to its mother. It lurches upright and ascends, clanking as it reengages with the ceiling, some eighty feet above. Wallpaper unpeels and unfurls new leaves, mildew and blackness is driven back into corners, where it disappears. Sconces that dangle by their wires suck back onto the walls and flare into warm light. Debris filters back up to wherever it came from, dust uncrumbling to be whole. Mirrors unbreak, windows restore.

I am stunned into silence. Vergil's brow rests against the wall over my shoulder, his weight pressed against me. "Do you see why I brought it here?" he intones. His voice is quietly labored. His gloved fingers still grip Yamato's hilt, but now he jerks her back, and the wall heals around her incursion.

Slowly, he raises his head and sheathes the katana.

The ballroom is pristine now, just as I remember it, the wall I lean against gilded and paneled and solid, the ceiling vaulted and frescoed and whole. There is no evidence of tragedy, no clawmarks, no scorching, no sign of trauma; everything is as it once was, down to the smallest detail.

He cages me, his hands planted on either side of my head, his strong, lithe body skimming my own. Our blood is calling out once more, his to mine and mine to his. An endless circuit, perfect, unbroken. As it was always meant to be.

"It's all here, Dante. The library, the conservatory, the study. Every room, intact. Even mine. Even yours."

My heart thuds, jacknifing sideways in my chest. I stare, conflicted, disbelieving, like someone who has just been offered a very expensive present they want to accept but know they shouldn't.

"It's what you came for. To make love to the past." Vergil whispers in his throaty, raw-silken way. "Let me make it right between us again, like I always do."


End file.
